The year wouldn't be complete without it :) It took a lot longer then I hoped, for variety of reasons, but finally went live. New version is much more pleasant to use, it is improved and simplified in many ways. Besides new design, it went through lots of code changes which may not be obvious and this is what I want briefly explain here. More...

In application where you publish things, published time seems simple. I write post at 12 pm, hit “publish” and all I want is my post saved with that 12 pm time-stamp. How hard it can be, right? Wrong, which I found the hard way trying to fix issues with publish time in relatively simple application. So I made this cheat sheet, or rather note, to help straighten things up. More...

Just a little concept for the next BE release. Really want to get rid of editing on live site and move all under admin. Why put it here and not just stick in the Github repository or Plunker? Because blog supposed to be center of your digital Universe and if not then something is wrong with it and it needs to be fixed. Blog, not the Universe - that is out of scope. Maybe next year. More...

If you are new to Entity Framework, especially to all new EF7, best way to start is to look at this code from sample application. It shows all you need to know to get rolling: connecting to database, creating a table, inserting and selecting data all in one simple console app. You can run it in the new shiny Visual Studio 2015 with break points on any line that you want to verify and literally walk step by step understanding the process. Which is: More...

Let's start by creating new empty ASP.NET website and adding Default.aspx with minimal “hello world” markup. When you access your site and check it with profiler, you’ll see single get request for default page. More...

Tell me what you want, but CSS is twisted. Some simple basic tasks that should be no-brainer sometimes make you throw things and say words you later deeply regret. Usually people use IE6 as lightning rod, sadly even if you don't care about IE6 anymore CSS still will find ways to hurt you. Consider this simple scenario - I want DIV with some text and 3 little ones inside it alined right. More...

Why in the world would you want to do that? Well, for one, you might want to use it in Remoting. Second possibility is when you have different objects that you want to treat the same way, and XML Document is one of them. Whatever your situation is, XML Document is not serializable as is. You'll have to provide your own implementation - create class that inherits from XMLDocument and implements ISerializable interface: More...

Did it ever happened to you? You have a problem and, after research and brainstorming, finally come up with this nice elegant solution. Two month (and hundred problems) later, you are staring at the screen with basically the same task in front of you. And trying to figure out - how the hell did you do it in the first place? Yes, I'm talking knowledge base - not an original idea and lots of people use their blogs exactly for this reason. I'm joining the crowd and will publish here code snippets under "code snippets" category. Here is the first one. More...

Code Formatter extension

For those who use BlogEngine as a technical blog (which is pretty common at this stage) code formatting feature is a must. Sure, you can squeeze your code in between “pre” tags and you are done – well, almost – editor will probably remove most of the white spaces and you’ll have to add some non-braking-spaces instead. But if you want coloring and nice formatting you’ll need more than that. There are several options to explore, and most obvious one is BlogEngine’s code formatter extension that comes with installation bits. To use extension you simply enclose your code within square-bracketed tags and specify what language you are going to format. If you do it from Tiny MCE rich box editor, it will add “p” and “pre” tags automatically for you, if you prefer doing it from HTML view you’ll have to add some tags manually, as shown in the picture on the right. Because Tiny MCE has a habit of re-formatting your HTML, based on your configuration results might vary and sometimes not be pretty. And you may not use Tiny MCE at all – if you replaced it with another editor. So you might run into problems using formatting extension, lots of people do (based on discussions in the BlogEngine's forum). No worries – there always more than one way to skin the cat! More...